"At our first luncheon he [T.S. Eliot] asked me what I wanted to do. I said: 'Be a poet.' 'I can understand you wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know what you mean by "being a poet,"' he objected."

When I was writing the movie Mean Girls-- which hopefully is playing on TBS right now!-- I went to a workshop taught by Rosalind Wiseman as part of my research. Rosalind wrote the nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes that Mean Girls was based on, and she conducted a lot of self-esteem and bullying workshops with women and girls around the country. She did this particular exercise in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., with about two hundred grown women, asking them to write down the moment they first "knew they were a woman." Meaning, "When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?" We wrote down our answers and shared them, first in pairs, then in larger groups. The group of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. "I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, 'Lick me!'" "I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, 'Nice ass'." There were pretty much zero examples like "I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team." It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty?

Joe [Kennedy Sr.] worked long hours and was often away all night. Rose never asked where he had been, any more than her mother had asked Honey Fitz. But at some point in 1920 she moved back to her parents' house for several weeks. After attending a religious retreat, she returned to Beals Street determined to fulfil her wifely and maternal duties. In 1921, they found a bigger house in the same neighborhood with a private bedroom for Rose. Soon they began taking separate vacations. Years later, when their granddaughter Caroline asked how they handled their differences, Rose explained: 'I would just say "Yes, dear," and then I'd go to Paris.'

I love playing tennis. I am an avid bridge player (a card game if you have not heard of it - it was more popular in the past!). I like to tour interesting things with my kids like power plants, garbage dumps, the Large Hadron Collider, Antarctica, missile Silos (Arizona)....

--Bill Gates on Reddit, answering questions today. Someone asked him what he does for fun.

We went to the baseball game, [Theodore] Dreiser and I. He was a dour, sulky, unpleasant man. He got bored about the fifth or sixth inning and said, "Come on, let's get out of here," so I had to leave. I remember it was a close game and I was outraged, but I had to go with him.....He was one of the most churlish, disagreeable men I ever met in my life, always thinking that everybody was cheating him. He'd come in about every three months to examine the ledger to see whether his royalty statements were correct. We soon discovered Dreiser didn't know what he was doing. He'd make a great pretense of checking, but he was just trying to scare us into being honest. He'd make little marks against all the items he'd examined and then he'd go out for lunch and we'd rub all the marks off, and when he came back he wouldn't even notice. We had a very pretty telephone operator, and Dreiser was intent upon making her his. It was the joke of the whole office, because his clumsy approaches were so ludicrous. Finally she went out to lunch with him just to see what would happen. When she came back she used an expression that became quite popular, but this was the first time I'd ever heard of it. She said, "He's just an old garter-snapper."